4 ms·

meh. "intelligence" and "artificial intelligence" are marketing terms. According to Nils Nilsson, McCarthy and Minsky picked the term so the Dartmouth Summer R

meh. "intelligence" and "artificial intelligence" are marketing terms. According to Nils Nilsson, McCarthy and Minsky picked the term so the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence would not be constrained by associations with "Cybernetics." McCarthy thought it (Cybernetics) too constrained because a: it traditionally focused on analog solutions and b: he thought Norbert Wiener was a bit pushy. I asked Minsky about this a couple decades ago and it was the only time he didn't tell me I was asking a stupid question. Apparently, after the conference, the name stuck because they found it easier to get research grants with the more "neutral" sounding name. I wonder how many people would trust "AI" if it was called "distributed indexing" or "stochastic generation."

bryan0 3y ago
I think the article explains very well why "intelligence" is a useful and important concept. Namely because it is concise way to discuss abilities which are highly correlated without naming each ability individually.
- morelisp 3y ago
  Somehow the rationalist community started at empty platitudes like "correlation is not causation" yet has ended up at substantive yet amazingly wrong conclusions like "correlation is identity", amazing turn, I gotta say I did not see it coming.
  - philovivero 3y ago
    But correlation is correlation. At least, for most people's definitions of the word.
  - thebooktocome 3y ago
    I’m frankly surprised Judea Pearl’s name didn’t come up in this article, they love waving him around at times like this.
golol 3y ago
Intelligence has a pretty clear meaning. Of course you will have a hard time nailing down a definition but that's also true for simple words like "chair" or "car". Artificial intelligence is also a pretty good name for a pretty clear concept: intelligence that has been artificially created. Any new ambiguity here comes from the ambiguity inherent in the word "artificial". Artifivial intelligence has a large range from if/else, linear regression and decision trees over ML methods to god-like superintelligence. That is not a problem, I think it's good that we have a term for this. I don't like when people try to reduce artificial intelligence to a smaller subset of these things. We should certainly come up with more precise terms in addition, but I think artificial intelligence is a very useful terminology and concept, not a marketing term.
- cacois 3y ago
  > Any new ambiguity here comes from the ambiguity inherent in the word "artificial". Not sure I agree here. Seems to me the ambiguity comes from the word "intelligence". As in, does that if/else clause indicate "intelligence" that's been programmed in. Of course we've created more terms like Artificial General Intelligence[1] to try to clear up the muddy definition of what constitutes intelligence. I think our fundamental challenge as society begins to try to understand what AI is comes down to what "intelligence" is. As you said, we all know what it is, but can't define it easily. If I write some really clever code, is the system running it intelligent? Is some of my intelligence imbued into that system, or does it have some of its own? At what point does a stochastic process approach intelligence - when it has enough data? Does that mean babies aren't born with intelligence, but acquire it as they learn more? So many questions, good questions, necessary questions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
  - nextaccountic 3y ago
    > does that if/else clause indicate "intelligence" that's been programmed in Yes, systems built with if/else rules are intelligent, in that they reproduce some heuristic rule that someone had to think about. I think the term "expert system" is kind of appropriate for them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system Of course they are not too intelligent, but, they are more intelligent than a rock, say. (unless this rock happen to be a chip running some neural network)
benlivengood 3y ago
All that matters is if they are effective terms or not. That's most of the point of the article; how to constructively inquire about whether giant LLMs might be effective at solving novel problems, perhaps better than humans can, in ways that matter to humans. Since we don't have a formal model of how systems like humans work we can't just plug numbers into equations or generate proofs that LLMs and other ML systems will or will not be able to control other systems better than humans, so we revert to less-formal concepts as best as we can. The formal AI safety folks (MIRI et al) already tried the formal approach; by their own admission it's hopeless and they poured a lot of time and bright minds into it and we won't be able to formally answer questions about intelligence via decision theory or alignment before we have actually-intelligent systems interacting with us. What will happen at that point? We don't know and can only use imprecise concepts to make educated guesses. If we don't make honest attempts at this we run the risk of being blindsided by unexpectedly capable AI/ML systems. This is why a large number of AI alignment researchers recommend pausing AI/ML systems at their current ability before they have a chance at being superhuman on most tasks. I wouldn't trust "distributed indexing" or "stochastic generation" if it could beat me at any particular skill of my choosing like similar systems can beat any of us at Chess or Go or Poker.
m463 3y ago
This reminds me of MRI which started out as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, but dropped "Nuclear" because of the stigma it carried.
- merchan 3y ago
  There's a less cynical explanation for that. "NMR" sounds a lot like "enema" and you don't want to get the two mixed up.
  - yetanotherloser 3y ago
    I'd never realised that before. Thank you, I think. Deary, deary me.
unholiness 3y ago
By that reasoning "Chemistry" is just a marketing term. It was used mostly interchangeably with "Alchemy" until Georg Stahl and others began writing (without justification!) that "Chemistry" describes more a more rational science and "Alchemists" were more interested in wealth. These untrue claims still became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where theories, teachings, and practice of chemistry evolved out of the former ways of thinking to become what we know it as today. AI, as used today, is certainly a coherent concept, and this article has justified and described it more thoroughly than most concepts I use daily. Who cares about the shaky history if it means something real today?

bryan0 3y ago

I think the article explains very well why "intelligence" is a useful and important concept. Namely because it is concise way to discuss abilities which are highly correlated without naming each ability individually.

morelisp 3y ago
Somehow the rationalist community started at empty platitudes like "correlation is not causation" yet has ended up at substantive yet amazingly wrong conclusions like "correlation is identity", amazing turn, I gotta say I did not see it coming.
- philovivero 3y ago
  But correlation is correlation. At least, for most people's definitions of the word.
- thebooktocome 3y ago
  I’m frankly surprised Judea Pearl’s name didn’t come up in this article, they love waving him around at times like this.

golol 3y ago

Intelligence has a pretty clear meaning. Of course you will have a hard time nailing down a definition but that's also true for simple words like "chair" or "car". Artificial intelligence is also a pretty good name for a pretty clear concept: intelligence that has been artificially created. Any new ambiguity here comes from the ambiguity inherent in the word "artificial". Artifivial intelligence has a large range from if/else, linear regression and decision trees over ML methods to god-like superintelligence. That is not a problem, I think it's good that we have a term for this. I don't like when people try to reduce artificial intelligence to a smaller subset of these things. We should certainly come up with more precise terms in addition, but I think artificial intelligence is a very useful terminology and concept, not a marketing term.

cacois 3y ago
> Any new ambiguity here comes from the ambiguity inherent in the word "artificial". Not sure I agree here. Seems to me the ambiguity comes from the word "intelligence". As in, does that if/else clause indicate "intelligence" that's been programmed in. Of course we've created more terms like Artificial General Intelligence[1] to try to clear up the muddy definition of what constitutes intelligence. I think our fundamental challenge as society begins to try to understand what AI is comes down to what "intelligence" is. As you said, we all know what it is, but can't define it easily. If I write some really clever code, is the system running it intelligent? Is some of my intelligence imbued into that system, or does it have some of its own? At what point does a stochastic process approach intelligence - when it has enough data? Does that mean babies aren't born with intelligence, but acquire it as they learn more? So many questions, good questions, necessary questions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  > does that if/else clause indicate "intelligence" that's been programmed in Yes, systems built with if/else rules are intelligent, in that they reproduce some heuristic rule that someone had to think about. I think the term "expert system" is kind of appropriate for them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system Of course they are not too intelligent, but, they are more intelligent than a rock, say. (unless this rock happen to be a chip running some neural network)

benlivengood 3y ago

All that matters is if they are effective terms or not. That's most of the point of the article; how to constructively inquire about whether giant LLMs might be effective at solving novel problems, perhaps better than humans can, in ways that matter to humans. Since we don't have a formal model of how systems like humans work we can't just plug numbers into equations or generate proofs that LLMs and other ML systems will or will not be able to control other systems better than humans, so we revert to less-formal concepts as best as we can. The formal AI safety folks (MIRI et al) already tried the formal approach; by their own admission it's hopeless and they poured a lot of time and bright minds into it and we won't be able to formally answer questions about intelligence via decision theory or alignment before we have actually-intelligent systems interacting with us. What will happen at that point? We don't know and can only use imprecise concepts to make educated guesses. If we don't make honest attempts at this we run the risk of being blindsided by unexpectedly capable AI/ML systems. This is why a large number of AI alignment researchers recommend pausing AI/ML systems at their current ability before they have a chance at being superhuman on most tasks. I wouldn't trust "distributed indexing" or "stochastic generation" if it could beat me at any particular skill of my choosing like similar systems can beat any of us at Chess or Go or Poker.

m463 3y ago

This reminds me of MRI which started out as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, but dropped "Nuclear" because of the stigma it carried.

merchan 3y ago
There's a less cynical explanation for that. "NMR" sounds a lot like "enema" and you don't want to get the two mixed up.
- yetanotherloser 3y ago
  I'd never realised that before. Thank you, I think. Deary, deary me.

unholiness 3y ago

By that reasoning "Chemistry" is just a marketing term. It was used mostly interchangeably with "Alchemy" until Georg Stahl and others began writing (without justification!) that "Chemistry" describes more a more rational science and "Alchemists" were more interested in wealth. These untrue claims still became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where theories, teachings, and practice of chemistry evolved out of the former ways of thinking to become what we know it as today. AI, as used today, is certainly a coherent concept, and this article has justified and described it more thoroughly than most concepts I use daily. Who cares about the shaky history if it means something real today?